Elizabeth Gilbert Discusses New Novel ‘The Signature of All Things’

When “Eat, Pray, Love” author Elizabeth Gilbert was four years old, she scrawled her name in a family-owned, 1784 edition of a book describing Captain Cook’s voyages. She destroyed the rare volume’s value in an instant, but has managed to salvage it to a degree some 40 years later. The book, which held maps and botanical illustrations, inspired her new novel, “The Signature of All Things,” which centers on a 19th-century female botanist named Alma Whittaker.

“I became captivated by Captain Cook but even more so by Joseph Banks, who was his chief botanist,” she said in a video interview with The Wall Street Journal. “It was like action adventure botany.”

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